Thursday, 1 January 2015

Hello again!
I was rooting around through some of my old files, and I found a series of pictures from when myself and two friends attempted (in a veeeery casual fashion) to re-fight the battle of the Black Gate. Since I won't have anything else to post up for a little while due to the fact that I find myself split between several projects at once, I thought I'd throw this up. I believe the game was played about a year ago, in January of last year (happy new year everyone by the way!). Unfortunately I hadn't counted on the fact that one of my friends had never played ANY wargames beforehand and that whilst I have done quite a few with the other, it had been at least six months since the last time we ha played a game together. So I might have been throwing my first friend in at the deep end a little.

Anyway, enough rambling, here are the pictures.

An overview of the battle field.

The men of Rohan and Dol Amroth attempt to counter flank the encircling Easterlings and Southrons.

The Orcs of the Morranon crash against the desperate strung out lines of men. Note the eye of Sauron token, which provides fearless to all evil models under its gaze (we forgot to use it most of the time, and failed the rolls to move when we did).

The game was a very chaotic affair, with various fumbles as far as rules go (like forgetting magic, the effects of banners and pretty much every special rule I wrote for the scenario). But it was still a lot of fun. I can't quite remember the outcome, but I think the Ring was destroyed, but not before several key heroes were killed. I myself took the forces of darkness, while my friends split Rohan and Gondor between them.

I did actually make a few terrain pieces especially for this game, such as the two Mordor mini towers you can see in the long distance shot. I also made several areas of fuming dead ground from the Dagorlad with large rocks on them that are scattered around the field. The game was played on a bed sheet since I couldn't find anything more suitable. I am planning on buying at least one gaming mat for rocky/underground areas, since it would actually see a lot of service (outside of historical games of course), any pointers on where I could get a good one in the comments would be welcome.

The general agreement was that while the game was fun, it was too big to make sure everything flowed smoothly. Not much I can do about that now since it was quite a long time ago, but I am carrying that through for the games I want to play in future.

Now I just wish I could find that War of Ring Pelenor Fields re-fight...